(Photo by Courtesy Everett Collection)
23 Fresh Angela Lansbury Movies
Angela Lansbury won six Tonys (including Best Actress for Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street), but Oscar, Emmy, and Grammy nominations came just as reliably in a most dynamic and multifaceted entertainment career across eight decades. Lansbury was a perennial at the Emmys with a dozen nominations for her comfort-television role as small-town sleuth Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote. And decades earlier within film, Lansbury had been an immediate sensation. She was Oscar nominated for her debut as the maid Nancy in 1944’s Gaslight, the movie that originated the ‘gaslighting’ expression used today. Lansbury would never be long gone from cinema screens after that, appearing in over 30 films until the 1970s, with more Oscar nominations for 1945’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate, playing the plotting, sinister Eleanor in John Frankenheimer‘s classic paranoid thriller. Lansbury received an Academy Honorary Award in 2013.
With Murder, She Wrote taking off in the ’80s, Lansbury reduced her time spent in movies, mostly choosing animated and family roles. She was a frequent and soothing figure for multiple generations of young filmgoers, starting with 1971’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and furthered with The Last Unicorn, Anastasia, Nanny McPhee, and as recently as The Grinch and Mary Poppins Returns, both in 2018. And Lansbury’s voice would become legend through the enchanted Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast: Her Grammy-nominated rendition of the theme song attached to the swooning chandelier waltz between Belle and Beast is arguably the most romantic moment in Disney history.
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